A management of resource state and or topology information in distributed systems or networks may have direct impacts on the resource management efficiency. A low frequency of information exchange may lead to a coarse knowledge of the states of the concerning network resources which may reduce the resource management performance. On the other hand a high frequency of information exchange may lead to a more precise knowledge of the resource states but also to more signaling overhead which again reduces the management performance.
Conventional information management between different network nodes and/or clusters of network nodes may take place either per polling, pulling, pushing or advertising. Polling typically refers to actively sampling the status of an external device by a client as a synchronous activity. Polling also refers to the situation where a device is repeatedly checked for readiness, and if it is not, it may be returned to a different task. Pulling refers to a style of network communication where an initial request for data originates from a client, and then is responded to by a server. The reverse is known as pushing or push technology, where the server pushes data to clients.
Conventional networks typically comprise diverse routers and switches with different capabilities and layers, such as, for example, Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) switches, flow based (OpenFlow=OF) switches, etc. Such an MPLS switch comprises a path computation client to manage its own traffic engineering database and is connected to a Path Computation Element (PCE) which is responsible for path finding and path optimization. An OF switch comprises an OpenFlow protocol client which manages a forwarding information base and is controlled by a remote OpenFlow controller which manages a plurality of OF switches. Thereby OpenFlow denotes a communications protocol that gives access to the forwarding plane (or data plane) of a network switch or router over the network.
In other words, a conventional network environment comprises several incompatible solutions where connections are provided using network management tools, MPLS, GMPLS, OpenFlow, PCE/PCC and others. Many control functionalities are performed either in the network elements themselves or in a variety of incompatible systems, leading to an inefficient use of the network and a non-optimal routing and/or load distribution.